Posts Tagged ‘Retirement’

And they’re off!

January 3, 2023

The checkered flag for one year doubles as the starter’s pistol for the next.

Brand-new year, same old feeling:

What now?

I’ve been doing laps on this circuit since March 1954, and I suppose I should be happy that I haven’t been black-flagged yet.

2022 was the first time I’ve been off the clock for an entire calendar year since I signed on with the Gazette Telegraph back in 1977. That’s what I call an extended pit stop (props to the mechanics at Social Security for the fuel and new rubber all the way around).

You’d think that after such a lengthy pause for the cause I’d have decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. Nope. Pissed it away cycling, running, hiking, grocery shopping, cooking, playing with the cat, reading, watching TV, and dicking around on the Innertubes. When I wasn’t asking “How high?” whenever Herself barked “Jump,” that is.

The old man took up real-estate sales when he retired from the U.S. Air Force, but that’s not for me. The only thing I ever sold successfully (other than free-range rumormongery to publishers) was weed to hippies. It was loads easier for a prospective buyer to commit to a $12 lid and there was less paperwork involved.

“Need any papers with that?”

“Naw, man, I got a pipe.”

And unlike publishers, the hippies paid up front.

Hey, maybe I should run for Squeaker of the House? Looks like Kevin McCarthy isn’t getting the trade-in value he’d expected for that scratched-and-dented soul of his with its four bald retreads, the weird stains in the back seat, and the air freshener that ain’t quite gettin’ ’er done.

Naw. That’d be worse than dealing weed or words. Imagine having to listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene while pretending to care what she’s going on and on and on about. I’d have to start smoking that shit again.

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Posted in Deep political thought, Feddle gummint | 20 Comments »

Rock ’n’ roll

December 31, 2022

Your Humble Narrator on the job in 2015. …

I’ve done a number of questionable things for money, but the only one with any staying power was journalism.

Earning power? Well … not so much. Especially after I left the newspaper to hang out my own shingle back in 1991.

Still, like crucifixion, it gets you out in the open air. Here’s your rock, there’s your hill, what’s your hurry?

I finally left that rock at the bottom of the hill about this time last year, and I can’t say I miss rolling it. Both rock and hill had shrunk over the years. But so had the pay. And the people who owned the hill at any given moment still seemed to think they were doing you a favor by letting you roll that rock.

“Well rolled indeed!” they’d exclaim as you reached the summit, gasping for air. “Sign here. And here. And here. And here. Yes, payment 30 days after publication as specified in the contract. Did we mention we’ve rewritten the contract? No? Well, we have, in Cretan Linear B this time, and I’m afraid we can’t cut you a check until you’ve scrawled your X on that old bottom line.

“Oh, dear, rock’s rolled down the bloody hill again. Be a dear and fetch it, won’t you? And do have your attorney or shaman or whomever look over that contract. Ta.”

Lacking professional support I eyeballed that contract myself and came away thinking the rock looked pretty good right where it was. It still does.

Doesn’t mean I’ve quit rolling rocks altogether, of course.

… and off it, as 2022 limps to a long-overdue finale.

Many years ago, between paying trips up and down the hill, I acquired my own tiny mound on the Innertubes and in my spare time nudged the odd pebble up its gentle slope. Strictly for giggles, mind you; if I were to charge admission it would feel like work.

I think I started blogging on AOL in the mid- to late Nineties; for sure I was doing my own self-hosted thing on a succession of small-time ISPs by 1999. The Wayback Machine has a capture from December 2000 that shows a visitor counter which started tallying the rubes a year earlier.

So, yeah. I’ve been at it for a few years, and I’m not giving it up. Not this year, and not next, Dog willing and the crick don’t rise. The bells and whistles come and go — the cartoons, the videos, the podcasting — but the blogging remains.

Who knows? It may just be The Next Big Thing.

But even if it isn’t, my thanks to all of yis who have gathered upon the hill — and who keep gathering, against your better judgment — to watch Your Humble Narrator perform his one-man, dinner-theater production of “Bowling with Sisyphus.”

I know, it’s only rock ’n’ roll. But I like it.

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Posted in Bloggery, Capitalist swine, Journalism | 19 Comments »

Tunnel vision

September 19, 2022

Miss Mia Sopaipilla is locked and loaded.

Everything old is new again.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla has rediscovered the joys of an old crinkle tube, some coarse wrapping paper, and a Wholeazon Amafoods shopping bag, all of which make fine sounds when run through, sprawled upon, or snuggled into.

Me, I likewise got back on the old hoss, metaphorically speaking, which is to say I started running again after giving my damaged toe a month of downtime.

Bikewise I hardly broke stride. Kept cranking out the 100-mile-plus weeks even with a pulverized piggie, and so far (knock on wood) I have avoided doing anything else inexplicably stupid to myself.

It’s nearly fall here in The Duck! City, but you’d hardly know it. Oh, the leaves are coming off the trees, but the weather widget says 87° in midafternoon and the hummers are still hitting the feeders like a cluster of knee-walking bog-trotters who just heard the barman call, “Time, gentlemen, time.”

Time, indeed.

A certain restlessness I ascribe to muscle memory. Come September Back In the Day® I would be in the early throes of cyclocross season, with a side of Interbike, and there would be much motoring and bicycling and running around to no particular purpose.

Your Humble Narrator at Dirt Demo circa 2005.

My Septembers are less hectic now. I did my last ’cross race in Bibleburg, way back in 2004, rocking a Steelman Eurocross but no spare bike, not even spare wheels. I rode to the course from the DogHaus, and when I flatted midrace, I simply replaced the tube and rode back home. It could be argued that I was not taking the whole thing seriously.

Thirteen years later I did my last Interbike. I lasted longer at that game because the finish-line payout was better and getting sockless drunk on the publisher’s dime was more or less a condition of employment.

But the publishers changed, and so did the game, and in January 2022 I retired, an event with all the significance of a mouse fart in a haboob.

I hadn’t expected to waltz offstage in the middle of a plague — which is over now, I understand, so, yay — but as the fella says, you go to retirement with the virology you have, not the virology you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Anyway, here it is September again and I still haven’t tapped my generous pension to buy a Peace Van and finally buckle down to the serious business of writing my great American road-trip story, “Travels with Snarly.”

Some days that Nobel Prize in Literature seems farther away than the finish line  with a slow leak and no spare. At least I’m still riding and running.

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Posted in Albuquerque, autumn, Cats, Cyclo-cross, Interbike, Journalism | 38 Comments »

A new day

January 4, 2022

The Universe put on quite the display this morning.

A thousand thank-yous to everyone who had kind words for me on the occasion of my retirement. May you be in Heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.

In my decades of distinguished service to cycling journalism I rose from lowly VeloNews cartoonist to lowly Bicycle Retailer and Industry News cartoonist, so of course there will be no gold-plated Garmin, no pension. I shall have to get by with the Socialist Insecurity and an occasional surreptitious dip into the purse of my lovely bride, who was making a career while I was making a shambles. Woe, etc.

Today, by way of celebration, I treated myself to a turkey-and-swiss sammich, a leisurely hour on the bike, and some light blog maintenance. Living the dream.

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Posted in Bloggery | 11 Comments »